If you're running PC100 memory already,then I'd suggest going straight to a PIII 500Mhz upgrade. These modules are only $10 or so on Ebay. It's a little more work, but all the info can be readily found on the forum.

If you're running PC100 memory already,then I'd suggest going straight to a PIII 500Mhz upgrade. These modules are only $10 or so on Ebay. It's a little more work, but all the info can be readily found on the forum.

I am running on PC66 memory (2x128MB + the onboard memory), does that prevent me from going with Pentium III ?

I am still confused about the PII vs PIII and the hack required, maybe you can clarify this for me about the 150MHZ penalty. I read that going with a pentium III will inflict a 150MHz penalty because the motherboard does not support SpeedStep? Does the hack with the 2kOhm resistor allows to go full speed? How many hacks are we talking about? (as I understand, the first hack is to get rid of error 127 by going into the bios and using a Hex editor to change one bit to disable the L2 cache and the second hack involves physically soldering a 2 kOhm resistor on the CPU). After the hack, will I be able to use the PIII at full speed ?

I think you've got it basically right, except that the PIII 500 is not a SpeedStep CPU so you won't lose 150MHz due to lack of support for SpeedStep -- it'll run at 500 just like a regular CPU. Also, you need to have some kind of utility that will re-enable the L2 cache after you bypass the L2 activation during the boot process.

Moving to a PIII 500 on a 600E should not require hardware soldering or physical hacks, only software and BIOS "hacks"/edits. Though as virge says, it is a bit of work.

Regarding the memory, I think only a very few people have successfully pushed their PC66 up to 100MHz bus speed. Normally, you replace the PC66 with PC100 and disable the onboard RAM (or it is automatically disabled when it fails to work during boot).